Feb 7 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
If protection against imports from country C (say, China) by the state of country A (say, the United States) is good, then an embargo by the government of C on exports to A must be good too. Anybody in A, or at least its government, should cheer. Something similar may happen regarding Chinese exports of some equipment ...
Feb 7 2023
By:
Alberto Mingardi
A new English translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi sposi (The Betrothed) was published a few months ago. It is excellent, and I wrote on it for the City Journal here. I’ve been trying to convince my classical liberal friends to read Manzoni for a little while - with almost no success. It may well b...
Feb 7 2023
By:
David Henderson
Simple answer to the title question: No. The number of employees in the private sector actually fell by 2.166 million. So why did the BLS report a huge increase in jobs? Seasonal adjustment. Alan Reynolds makes this point in "Can a Seasonal Adjustment to Lost Jobs Justify a Tighter Fed?," Cato at Liberty, Februar...
Feb 6 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
It is not rare that a top politician wants the good people to believe that a time of disaster preceded his rising to power and immediately followed his descent from the throne. How could the politician or his accomplices not see that this is a lie? Former president Donald Trump is not the only one to live in a lie, but...
Feb 6 2023
By:
David Henderson
Last week I wrote a critique at Defining Ideas, a Hoover Institution publication, of the views of Paul Krugman and Olivier Blanchard. Blanchard (pictured above) wrote a brief note defending himself and I wrote back. It went a few rounds. To recall, I had one critique of Paul Krugman and two critiques of Blanchard. M...
Feb 5 2023
By:
Alberto Mingardi
During the month of February, I’ll have the pleasure to coordinate a Virtual Reading Group on Bruno Leoni’s Freedom and the Law. I will write some rather impressionistic blog posts on the book, which I have read and read again over the years. Freedom and the Law is a short work, which emerged out of lectures that L...
Feb 5 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
When I see examples of ChatGPT in action, I am reminded of the answers that college students provide on test questions. Yesterday, I finally got around to asking my first Chat question. I decided to test the famous AI with a question that students usually get wrong. Chat got the question wrong. (And no, the "ceteris ...
Read this David Henderson Book Review
Apr 5 2021
By David R. Henderson
A Book Review of The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn, by Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg.1 Since 1996, I've had a deal with the editors of the Wall Street Journal. I get up early on the West Coast the day the Nobel Prize in Economic Science is announced, decide wi...
Feb 5 2023
By:
Kevin Corcoran
I’ve never been accused of being hesitant to nitpick (and if anyone ever did make that accusation, I’d nitpick it apart!), but sometimes what seems like a nitpick is actually an important point. Economists often make what seems like a nitpicky point to the non-economist. It usually takes a form like this: “Actual...
Feb 5 2023
By:
David Henderson
Play the hand you're dealt. This morning I rewatched a fun ESPN "30 for 30" show about the tuck rule and the role it played in the New England Patriots' (aka "The New England Economists" according to my University of Western Ontario mentor, economist John Palmer) 2002 playoff victory over the Oakland Raiders. In...
Feb 4 2023
By:
Carlos Martinez
Over the last two decades, socialism has been galloping into the mainstream of policymaking and youth culture. College students flirt with the idea so much that almost 40% show some form of positive bias toward socialism. This bias is linked to increased taxes, more regulation, and the implementation of social policies...
Feb 4 2023
By:
David Henderson
Immigration critic Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, recently seemed to challenge the idea that more immigration would reduce inflation. One would think that more immigration would reduce inflation, based on the simple fact that more immigration would lead to more output. W...
Feb 3 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
When confronted with evidence that the job market is red hot, naysayers often point to the employment-population ratio (E/P), which remains below pre-Covid levels: How can this be? After all, the US total population has risen by less than 1% over the past three years. In contrast, payroll employment is up by 2%...
Feb 3 2023
By:
David Henderson
The vast majority of economists understand that economy-wide price controls are a bad idea. The reason is that they prevent prices from adjusting in individual markets. Supplies and demands for various goods change a lot, and avoiding price controls allows prices to adjust to those changes in supplies and deman...
Feb 2 2023
By:
Scott Sumner
Finding mistakes in the media is like shooting ducks in a barrel. But I hope today's post will do more than take a few potshots, I am going to try to illustrate some fundamental problems with macroeconomics.The Economist has an interesting article discussing the inflation that hit Europe in the period around 1500-165o....
Feb 2 2023
By:
Pierre Lemieux
Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar criticizes the “shadow work” that used to be done by hired third parties but that greedy companies (as we are led to understand) have now pushed onto the consumers themselves (“The Real Cost of Shadow Work,” January 30, 2022). Examples include banking and travel booking, ...